The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers.
It began with dehumanization.
Long before Jews were murdered, they were turned into an idea: the hidden enemy, the parasite, the conspirator behind every crisis.
Europe was already full of antisemitism before the war. Economic collapse, humiliation after World War I, fear of communism, and social chaos made people search for scapegoats. The Nazis gave them one.
To Nazi propaganda, Jews were “Judeo-Bolsheviks”. Communists. Capitalists. Globalists. Rootless elites. Somehow responsible for both capitalism and communism, both weakness and domination, both decadence and revolution.
The accusation never had to make sense.
It only had to make Jews seem dangerous enough to remove.
At first, Nazi policy focused on exclusion and expulsion: push Jews out of professions, universities, citizenship, public life, and eventually Europe itself.
But then Germany conquered more territory.
Poland brought millions more Jews under Nazi control. The invasion of the Soviet Union turned propaganda into mass shootings. In Ukraine, Jews were murdered in ravines like Babyn Yar, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in two days. Local collaborators and auxiliary police helped identify, gather, guard, and murder Jews.
This is how genocide becomes scalable: records, police, railways, bureaucrats, neighbors, and silence.
Norway shows how fast it could happen when the state already knew who the Jews were. Authorities relied on police information, synagogue membership lists, statistical records, property inventories, and “J”-stamped identity cards. Once the decision came, Norwegian police helped arrest Jews for deportation.
Hungary shows another version. For years it had antisemitic laws and was allied with Nazi Germany, but mass deportations accelerated after Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. In less than two months, about 435,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, most murdered on arrival. Warnings arrived, including the Vrba-Wetzler report; action came only after hundreds of thousands had already been sent.
The Allies had information by 1942 that Jews were being murdered en masse at Auschwitz. By 1944, the Vrba-Wetzler report gave one of the most detailed eyewitness descriptions of the gas chambers and crematoria. The world did not lack information. It lacked urgency.
Even the Red Cross failed the Jews.
Theresienstadt was staged by the Nazis as a “model ghetto” to deceive outsiders if they didn't bother to look hard enough. In 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited, saw the performance, and issued a favorable report, not even noting an issue with forcing Jews into concentration camps in the first place. Even in April 1945, after other camps were being liberated, it continued to repeat it's erroneous findings.
That failure has an ugly echo today: Jewish civilians - women, children and Holocaust survivors were taken hostage by Hamas, hidden underground, suffered international starvation, sexual abuse and torture, and denied basic humanitarian access - while the same international institutions that speak endlessly about humanitarian law could not even force a visit, while insisting on visits for the armed terrorists who took the hostages.
But "Palestinians" also played an active role during the holocaust - The grand Mufti - Haj Amin al-Husseini was not a mere footnote.
He met Hitler, allied himself with the Nazi project, recruited tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers to the SS, spread Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, and he repeatedly lobbied Nazi and Axis officials to block Jewish escape routes to Palestine - including transports involving Jewish children.
In 1943, he intervened against proposals to transfer Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania to Palestine after thousands of Jewish children had managed to reach safety. In 1944, he objected to certificates for 900 Jewish children from Hungary, warning that they might end up in Palestine and urging that, if they had to be removed, they be sent somewhere under “active control”, such as Poland - which, in 1944, meant the machinery of Nazi extermination.
And the world around the Nazis was not innocent.
There were righteous gentiles - brave people who risked everything to hide, smuggle, forge papers, and save Jews.
But there were also governments that collaborated, police forces that obeyed, bureaucrats who made lists, neighbors who informed, and countries that closed their doors.
Even Britain, while fighting Hitler, arrested thousands of German and Austrian “enemy aliens”, including Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis, and shipped many of them to Australia on the HMT Dunera - alongside actual German and Italian POWs and Nazi sympathizers. Jews who escaped Nazi persecution were treated as enemy aliens together with the very people they had escaped from.
That is the uncomfortable lesson.
The Holocaust was carried out by Nazi Germany.
But it was made easier by a world that had already learned to treat Jews as a problem.
And that is why today’s language matters.
When Jews are again described as the hidden power behind everything - colonialism, capitalism, war, media, money, white supremacy, genocide - we should recognize the pattern.
Societies that blame Jews are usually confessing their own decay.
When Europe tried this before and blamed Jews for capitalism, communism, war, poverty, humiliation, and social collapse.
It made Europe poorer, crueler, and morally disfigured.
Now the same disease is back with updated vocabulary: colonialism, whiteness, genocide, media, money, power.
When Israeli civilians and Jews are treated as legitimate targets, when hostages posters are ripped off poles, when Jewish safety concerns are mocked as propaganda, when terrorist murder is excused as “resistance”, when campuses and streets decide Jews are uniquely guilty - it is 1938, and 1939 comes next.
